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| [February 17, 2005] |
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IM2, Inc. Secures $8 Million Investment From Redpoint Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners
PALO ALTO, Calif. --(Business Wire)-- Feb. 17, 2005 -- FatLens, a Patent-Pending E-Commerce Search Engine Delivers Web's Most Comprehensive Product Results; Integrates Instant Messaging and Collaboration for Online Shopping with Friends and Family
IM2, Inc., an emerging leader in e-commerce search and developer of FatLens (www.fatlens.com), today announced it has secured $8 million in a Series A round of funding from marquee investors Redpoint Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners with additional participation from Cambrian Ventures. The investment coincides with the company's recent sneak preview of FatLens, the first e-commerce search engine based on patent-pending technology, built specifically to enhance the online shopping experience. Innovative FatLens technology instantaneously delivers the web's most comprehensive, relevant and unbiased product search results, and the first-ever integrated search with instant messaging for real-time, collaborative online shopping with friends and family.
"IM2 has developed a compelling approach to e-commerce search with FatLens, which is poised to lead the next-generation of search capabilities for online shopping," noted Tim Haley, founding partner of Redpoint Ventures, investors in companies such as MySimon, Ask Jeeves, Netflix, and Excite, among others. "FatLens technology delivers remarkable product search results with superior comprehensiveness and relevance, that when combined with integrated instant messaging for collaboration, is certain to resonate with millions of underserved online shoppers."
"When we looked to make our next investment in the fast growing search sector - IM2's FatLens was a standout," added Ravi Mhatre, general partner at Lightspeed Ventures, whose other investments have included DoubleClick and BlueNile.
With this funding, Haley and Mhatre join the company's board of directors, which includes IM2 co-founders Nanda Kishore who also serves as president and CEO and Siva Kumar, a key company advisor. IM2 is also supported by an esteemed group of technical advisors, including Dr. Prabhakar Raghavan, a notable search technology expert, and senior vice president and CTO of Verity Corporation as well as Dr. Anand Rajaraman, founding partner of Cambrian Ventures and founder of Junglee, which was acquired by Amazon for $250 million. Both Raghavan and Rajaraman are consulting professors with Stanford University's Department of Computer Science.
The preview version of FatLens is initially available for the online event tickets category, a $2.5 billion industry. Currently, technologies employed by search engines and comparison shopping sites do not work well for product categories like event tickets, where the individual items are hard to compare. This makes the event tickets category an ideal showcase for the advanced search capabilities of FatLens coupled with the instant messaging/collaboration feature that coordinates purchases between two or more online shoppers. Later this year, the company anticipates adding additional product categories that are equally conducive to its innovative product search and the joint/group shopping experience.
With the preview version of FatLens, users can experience the rich set of e-commerce search capabilities with confidence to pinpoint and purchase hard-to-find tickets and great deals by searching across the largest possible inventory available from the hundreds of online ticket sites. Additionally, they can share and evaluate choices with friends and family, then coordinate purchases using FatLens' real-time, instant messaging and collaboration feature using popular IMs from AOL and Yahoo!.
"Online shoppers are currently underserved by search engines and event ticket outlets that cannot deliver the full range of choice to consumers," stated Kishore. "FatLens' product search results are unbiased and comprehensive, geared to benefit the end-user who is seeking the most options and the best tickets available on the web. We've set out to greatly enhance the online shopping experience with the added ability to not only get superior product search results, but to share and coordinate purchases with an IM/collaboration feature- all from a single location on the web."
Comprehensive Search Across the Web
The preview version of FatLens instantaneously delivers the most comprehensive, unbiased search results for event tickets by crawling hundreds of e-commerce, marketplace and classified sites all across the web, including TicketMaster, eBay, Craigslist, Yahoo, Razorgator, TicketsNow, Stubhub, and many box-office, broker, team and sports league sites.
-- Hundreds of event ticket sites are crawled, deeply indexed and automatically categorized on FatLens.
-- FatLens provides a searchable index to an inventory of between 4 to 5 million tickets at any given time.
-- The FatLens searchable inventory is nearly five times the size of the single largest ticket sales site.
-- FatLens serves 100 percent unbiased content; relevant listings are delivered for the consumer benefit first and foremost.
-- FatLens is speedy, delivering content within fractions of a second - even though searching through millions of items for relevant content.
Integral to the rich user experience are several patent-pending capabilities, developed and utilized exclusively by FatLens, including deep indexing and smart categorization technologies and the TRIP Score(TM) relevancy scheme (Tree Rank Induced with Plausibility). As such, FatLens can derive the relevancy to an individual user's query by quickly finding the closest set of matching items and delivering the correct set of corresponding products. Unlike general purpose search engines, FatLens technology is not based on page ranking, or site importance.
IM/Real-Time Collaboration - The Next-Generation of Online Shopping
Complimenting its superior product search results, FatLens also delivers the collaborative aspects inherent in off-line shopping today. With its IM/collaboration feature, these joint/group experiences are now possible, whether a group of friends want to attend a sporting event, or concert together and need to consult/coordinate on the purchase, or someone wants an opinion, or expert advise while shopping online, FatLens facilitates the interaction.
"There is already a move toward greater interaction in online shopping today with the wide spread use of sharing wish lists, and select sites that allow for communication between online shoppers and customer service representatives," added Kishore. "FatLens is first to take these concepts to the next natural level for real-time collaboration between shopping peers. We believe this greatly enhances the overall experience, making it more efficient and fun, while encouraging greater e-commerce activity."
Using the FatLens IM/Collaboration feature, users can:
-- Search for products, share choices of interest with their friends and family, then invoke the IM/collaboration capability to;
-- Invite other IM users (from their IM buddy lists) to view these preferences through a popular instant messaging platform (using their favorite IM such as Yahoo Messenger and AOL Instant Messenger), and;
-- Refine their individual product preferences with the buddy group while engaged in chat discussions through the instant-messaging platform; and
-- Make purchases based on joint preferences and discussions.
About IM2, Inc.
IM2, Inc. is an emerging leader in e-commerce search and developer of FatLens, (www.fatlens.com), the first e-commerce search engine built from the ground up with patent-pending technology designed specifically to enhance the online shopping experience. Innovative FatLens technology instantaneously delivers the web's most comprehensive, relevant and unbiased product search results, and the first-ever integrated search with instant messaging for real-time, collaborative online shopping with friends and family. Founded in 2003, IM2, Inc. is based in Palo Alto, CA and is funded by Redpoint Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Cambrian Ventures.
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